Lieutenant Hardy came across the room to join us.
“In the sense of any kind of physical evidence,” the detective said, “this suite and your luggage appear to be clean, Mr. Nelson.”
“I wasn’t waiting in suspense, Lieutenant,” Stan said.
“I’d like very much not to have to take legal steps to prevent you from catching that five o’clock flight to Vegas,” Hardy said. “But I’d like very much for you to stay put for a while—here, in the hotel.”
Stan frowned. “I have a contractual obligation to appear in Vegas tomorrow night,” he said.
“The people at the Oasis would surely understand why you might have to stay over,” Hardy said. “They watch TV, listen to radio, read the newspapers.”
“They might understand, Lieutenant,” Stan said. “But I don’t. Why do you want me to stay on? I may or may not have signed an autograph for the dead boy. That’s my total involvement.”
“You are the target of our anonymous phone caller,” Hardy said. “We are set up here at the Beaumont to trace his next call, when and if it comes. If we can pick him up and you can identify him we may be on the way to solving a homicide.”
Johnny Floyd had joined us. “We’re already checked out, bill paid, taxi ordered,” he said. He always seemed angry about everything, cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips.
“Now that this story has broken the whole bloody world is trying to get at me,” Stan said. “I dare you to take a look down in the lobby.”
“I know,” Hardy said. “The word’s out that you’re leaving. So you stay put. It could only be a few hours, a day or two at most.”
“I think I can give you privacy, Nelson,” Chambrun said. “There are three penthouses on the roof. I live in one, an old lady who has been a tenant for more than thirty years has the second. The third is kept available for important diplomats coming to the United Nations. That one happens to be available at the moment.”
“You don’t have to make yourself bait for some crazy, Stan,” Johnny Floyd said. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Only one elevator goes to the roof,” Chambrun said. “The operator won’t take anyone up there who hasn’t been okayed by me, Mrs. Haven, or whoever is in number three. No press, no autograph hounds, no one you don’t authorize. We can keep you safer than you would be anywhere else. Until this anonymous troublemaker is out of the way I don’t think you could do better, Nelson.”
“Let ’em clean up their own mess!” Johnny Floyd urged.
Stan was silent for a moment. “We’ll stay—for a while, at least,” he said.
Stan Nelson and Johnny Floyd were right about the lobby down on the main floor. It was a madhouse. Those of us who, I suppose you could say, had been on the “inside” since Carl Hulman had found a dead boy in the Health Club pool had not been really aware of the ghoulish excitement caused by TV and radio in the first two or three hours. That was all thanks to our anonymous phone caller and his hints about Stan Nelson.
The Beaumont had been invaded by an army of people who had probably never been inside its doors before, three quarters of them young female shriekers. Stan would have to appear sooner or later, and they would scream at him, cheer and jeer at him, and unless he was carefully protected, tear off his clothes. In addition to the shriekers and the rubberneckers there were the press, TV, and radio people. It was their job to be there, to get some kind of statement from Hardy, from Stan himself, and in a minor league way from me, representing the hotel. I could, they supposed, tell them where Stan was and they could charge after him like a runaway army.
I wasn’t telling, of course. While I found myself in the center of a whirlpool of screeching fans and demanding reporters, Stan Nelson and Johnny Floyd and Butch Mancuso were being quietly escorted up to the penthouse on the roof by Chambrun and Jerry Dodd. Once they were safely there we could begin to deal with the swarm of unwanted ghouls who had taken over our world.
I had a standard answer to the questions with which I was being smothered. “Stan is still being interrogated by the police.”
“Is the dead boy Stan’s son?”
“Do the police think Stan killed him?”
“Did Stan identify the boy for them?”
And then there was a question I couldn’t ignore. It came from my friend Eliot Stevens of International, who had managed to maneuver himself next to me in the center of the mob.
“So you’ve slipped him out of the hotel while we wait here yammering?” he asked.
“‘For Your Eyes Only,’” I said, approximating the title of the latest James Bond movie. “When he says ‘yes,’ Eliot, you’ll be the first to hear it. He’s still in the hotel but out of reach.”
“Chambrun’s penthouse?” he asked.
“Close,” I said.
“Okay, chum. But just remember I’ll hang the Beaumont out to dry if you try to bypass me on this.”
“Just come up with an idea how to get rid of all these creeps without turning a fire hose on them and Chambrun may give you his right arm.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is,” he said. He moved away and stood up on one of the lobby chairs, waving his arms for silence. When he could be heard he identified himself. “I’m Eliot Stevens of International,” he shouted at them. “I’ve just been informed by the hotel that Stan Nelson has been taken down to police headquarters on Centre Street. If you hope to see him that’s the place to go and wait.”
There were howls of disappointment, and then people began to jostle themselves out onto the street, like a receding tidal wave. Eliot gave me a wry smile.
“So, business as usual, provided you play ball, Buster,” he said.
Instantly a clean-up crew was in action picking up candy wrappers, empty cigarette packs, crumpled papers, and other garbage. In fifteen minutes the Beaumont lobby would be its usual elegant self. I saw Mr. Atwater, the head desk clerk, waving at me. I went over to him.
Andy Atwater is a kind of professional greeter for new guests who are just signing in. He has a professional smile and professional cheerfulness. At this moment he looked like he’d eaten something that disagreed with him, his face white, mouth tight and unsmiling. I supposed the invasion of the shriekers had unsettled him.
“They won’t be back soon, Andy,” I told him.
“Mr. Chambrun wants you down on the truck-loading platform in the basement,” Atwater said. “They found Tony Camargo down there, stuffed in a laundry hamper, beaten to death they say. What the hell’s going on around here, Mr. Haskell?”
PART TWO
ONE
IT WAS JUST A little while ago—a few hours actually—that Tony Camargo, the bright-eyed young Italian night manager of the Health Club, had stood next to me describing his nightly closing procedure to Lieutenant Hardy. It was his testimony that had set up what Chambrun had called a “classic locked-room mystery”—how could Eddie Sands’ body have been deposited in the pool when there was no way to get it there?
Believe it though, I didn’t imagine for an instant as I took the rear service elevator down to the loading platform that there was any connection between the shooting of Eddie Sands and some kind of mugging attack on Tony Camargo. I should have had my head examined.
There is a substreet-level parking garage under the Beaumont. There is also a separate service ramp for trucks bringing in food supplies, liquor, and other daily needs along with space for other trucks that cart away trash, laundry that goes to a big hotel service, equipment that our maintenance crew can’t repair and needs to go back to the manufacturer for rebuilding. One of the regular routines is the mid-afternoon pickup by the laundry service. Soiled sheets, pillowcases, towels, and other linens from the restaurants and bars are stuffed in large hampers by the maid service and other crews and taken down to the loading platform. The routine hadn’t varied on this day. The laundry service brought back the hampers from the day before, filled now with washed and ironed linens, and prepared to take away the soiled accumul
ation. The trucking boys had noticed that one of the take-away hampers seemed unusually heavy. They opened the wicker lid to the hamper and saw nothing but used sheets and towels. As they were closing the lid one of the men glanced down and saw that they’d moved the hamper away from a pool of blood that it had covered in its original position. Taking out the top layer of soiled laundry they discovered the beaten and mangled body of a man.
Ironically, Manhattan Homicide was already installed in the Beaumont. There was no problem this time about identifying the body. Lieutenant Hardy had interrogated Tony Camargo earlier in the day. Chambrun had been summoned down from the penthouse area where he’d been settling in Stan Nelson and his two companions. He was in a cold fury when I joined the crowd of cops and stunned-looking employees on the loading platform. The murder of Eddie Sands had been an impersonal kind of problem-puzzle to him. Tony Camargo was his boy, one of his people.
“Extraordinary coincidence,” I heard Sergeant Lawson, Hardy’s man, say.
“Coincidence my foot!” Chambrun said. He glared at Hardy who gave him a questioning look. “Simple answer is always there for a locked-room puzzle, you said, Walter. Tony was going to remember, sooner or later, something that would explain how the Sands boy got into the pool upstairs. Somebody made sure he’d never get to remember and tell us.”
If God had spoken I couldn’t have been surer that He was right. I could see that Hardy had bought it, too.
On the wall at the back of the loading platform there was a collection of tools for emergency use—a hammer, a screwdriver, a hatchet. I don’t remember all the items except for the iron wrecking bar. It was no longer in its place. It had been discarded down onto the roadway of the ramp and was lying under the laundry truck, covered with blood. No doubt it was the weapon used to crush Tony’s head like an overripe melon. On the wall where the tools hung there were spatters of blood for a distance of about four feet, and on the floorboards of the platform in that area. No doubt about where the attack had taken place.
“Man beaten to death and no one sees or hears anything,” Hardy muttered, almost to himself.
“Tony never made a sound after the first blow was struck,” Chambrun said. “The medical examiner will tell you that, I’m sure.”
“What was he doing down here?” Sergeant Lawson asked.
“That’s simple enough,” Jerry Dodd, our security chief, told him. “He was home, off duty, when we called him to ask him to come down here to talk to Lieutenant Hardy about the trouble upstairs. He lives in the Bronx. He drove down in an old Toyota he owns, parked it in the garage like every day. He was on the way to get his car and go out when this happened.”
“Anyone could drive in off the street and wait for him down here,” Sergeant Lawson said.
“We don’t run a cheap flophouse here, Sergeant,” Jerry said. “You don’t just ‘drive in’ the garage. If you’re a guest in the hotel, or you’re coming here for a meal, or to visit someone, you go to the front entrance, the doorman gives you a ticket for your car, one of our parking attendants puts it down here for you. When you leave, you give your ticket to the doorman and he sends for your car. People don’t wander around down here who don’t belong here.”
“You’re saying someone who does belong down here killed him?” Lawson said.
“I’m just saying this area wasn’t crawling with strangers,” Jerry said. “When you’ve had a chance to talk to the parking attendants and the garage people you may come up with someone who saw a stranger down here.”
“Trucks, like this laundry vehicle, come and go,” Hardy said.
“It’s not a thruway,” Jerry said. “At the top of the ramp there’s a gate. There’s a man operating it. He doesn’t open the gate till he knows you’re supposed to be here.”
“The whole hotel has been crowded with people who aren’t normally here,” Hardy said. “Stan Nelson’s twenty-four-hour telethon, then again this morning and early afternoon after the news broke about Eddie Sands up in the pool. Normal security must break down in times like that, because everybody is a stranger to your security people, Dodd. Thousands of them in the space of a day and a half.”
“Strangers weren’t holding a meeting down here,” Jerry said.
Scotty McPherson, the daytime engineer on duty, had the closest thing to a helpful story. He’s a big, lumbering man who can handle a pinpoint electrical connection with fingers as agile as a cardsharp’s.
“Tony stopped by my office—couldn’t have been ten minutes before it happened,” Scotty told us.
“Where is your office?” Hardy asked.
“Just down the corridor there. I call it an office, but it’s really a room where I have all the instrument panels in front of me. Tony and I are old friends. He’s worked in the hotel for some ten years, I guess. Ever since he got the Health Club job—what is it, five, six years—he’d come to work about four-thirty, park his car, and walk past my place on his way to the service elevator. He’d stick his head in the door and say ‘hello.’ Always laughing and kidding. He had a collection of Polish jokes as long as your arm.”
“No Scotch jokes?” Hardy asked him, deadpan.
“He knew better,” McPherson said. “I don’t come on till noon, so I didn’t see him when he arrived this morning. Not the usual time for him. When you guys got through with him in the Health Club he came by my place. I’d had the word about the trouble upstairs, and naturally we talked about it.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Only that everything had been shipshape when he left last midnight. Nobody in the pool, no way anyone could hide up there or get in after he’d gone, but somebody had, did.”
“Did he suggest how?”
“He just kept saying there was no way, and yet it had happened,” McPherson said.
“You say that was about ten minutes before he was attacked, Scotty,” Chambrun interrupted. “How do you arrive at that kind of timing?”
“Figuring backwards,” Scotty said. “This laundry truck driver came screaming down the hall that there was a dead man in one of the laundry hampers. There’s an electric clock on the wall in my place. I looked at it then and it was just three-thirty-five. The laundry truck usually arrives about three-thirty. They were on schedule. It seemed like Tony had only just left me. But there had to be time for someone to slug him, jam his body in that laundry hamper, and take off before the truck pulled in. It must have happened as soon as he walked from my place down the corridor to here.”
“And you didn’t hear anything? Didn’t hear Camargo call for help?” Hardy asked.
“Just listen for a minute, Lieutenant,” Scotty said.
No one spoke for a moment. You could hear the noise of the machinery that runs the elevators, the sound of car motors in the garage. A metallic voice came over a loud-speaker. “Car number one eighty-two at the front entrance, please.” The doorman had a customer for the parking attendants.
“You can’t whisper down here, Lieutenant,” Scotty said. “If I’d heard somebody shout I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it, most likely. I’d have thought it was one of the parking boys shouting something at one of the others.”
“You’re sure Tony didn’t suggest he had any theory about what happened in the Health Club, Scotty?” Chambrun asked again.
“Just that it couldn’t have happened but it did,” Scotty said. “He said he was going out to see a guy before he had to check back in for his shift.”
“What guy?”
Scotty shrugged. “He just said he was going to see a guy.”
“He didn’t suggest this ‘guy’ might have answers about what happened in the Health Club?”
“He didn’t say so. He didn’t act like it,” Scotty said.
“Damn,” Chambrun said.
A slim, blond young man came down the corridor onto the loading platform. He had a blond mustache and rather long sideburns. His blue eyes were red as though he’d been crying.
“Somebody just phone me
at home about what happened, Mr. Chambrun,” he said. “My God, how awful!”
He was Jimmy Heath, Tony Camargo’s assistant, who had helped Tony close up the night before.
We’d had, you might say, a death in the family.
The Beaumont doesn’t operate on a stool-pigeon system, though an outsider might have thought so. It was like a vast machine made up of meshing cogwheels. Be a little off-timing on one operation and you could start the whole machinery to bumping and thumping. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost—” The first time something went out of kilter there were inquiries as to why and whatever was wrong was corrected. If it went wrong a second time you could expect a thunderbolt to be dropped from heaven, which in the Beaumont means Chambrun’s office.
In the space of twenty-four hours the machinery had malfunctioned twice, routines had fouled up twice, and it had cost two lives. Hardy could go on the medical examiner’s report on a gunshot and beating wounds, on what his fingerprint experts and photographers could produce at the two murder scenes, on the hope of tracking down the anonymous phone caller who obviously knew more than he had any business knowing, the police lab report on dirt and fibers found on Eddie Sands’ body that might provide a clue as to where the boy had been killed.
Chambrun, who played the game by intuition and hunch, was faced in another direction. Something had fouled up in the smooth functioning of his world. Tony Camargo had missed something that would explain how Eddie Sands’ body got into the pool, and before he could remember it someone who had no business being there had penetrated to the loading platform and bludgeoned Tony to death with a weapon he must have known was waiting there to be used. What had Tony missed? Who knew that he would eventually go to the loading platform on the way to picking up his car, a daily routine for him for a good ten years?
Chambrun and Jerry Dodd and I left the gruesome business of dealing with Tony Camargo’s remains to Homicide and went back up to the Man’s plush office on the second floor. We took Jimmy Heath, Tony’s teary-eyed assistant, along with us.
With Intent to Kill Page 6
